Determined in its defiance, the El Paso Independent School District board is prepared to do battle with the Texas Education Agency, which the board says muscled its way into taking over the district.

Board members on Wednesday said they will protect the will of the voters and challenge Texas Commissioner of Education Michael Williams' decision to appoint a board of managers and a conservator to oversee the district of 64,000 students that has been plagued by a cheating scandal.

They called his decision "political gamesmanship" and accused him of being swayed by a few of El Paso's elite and the El Paso Times.

About 12:15 a.m. Wednesday, the school board unanimously voted to request that the TEA review Williams' appointments of a conservator and board of managers who will run the district for up to two years, pending approval of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The board also decided to submit an appeal to the U.S. Department of Justice in response to the TEA's request for pre-clearance of the board of managers. The federal Voting Rights Act requires the state to receive Justice Department approval for replacing an elected board.

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The two reviews by the TEA must be done within 30 calendar days after it receives the district's request. The TEA must have the request by Sunday.

After the reviews are conducted, the agency will issue a final ruling, which might include changes or additions to Williams' initial decision.

A TEA official who has not been part in the state's involvement in the El Paso school district's situation will oversee the reviews, TEA spokesman Gene Acuña said.

Reporter Hayley Kappes

School board President Isela Castañon-Williams accused Commissioner Williams of disenfranchising El Paso voters and basing his decision on comments from "a small group of people and the newspaper."

"The voters are best suited to decide who should take charge of the district, not the political appointee who is unaccountable to the voters," Castañon-Williams said, reading from a statement after the meeting ended Wednesday morning.

Acuña said Williams' decision to strip the school board's power was based on comments from a variety of leaders in the city, elected officials and parents of students.

"He had numerous discussions with many members of the community," Acuña said. "To try to question or dismiss that decision, in one way, questions the concerns expressed by the people of El Paso."

David Dodge, the school board's vice president, charged that the board of managers appointed by Williams will not represent the entire district because three of them live on the West Side. And he said the conservator, Judy Castleberry, is not from El Paso and her knowledge of the district is based on newspaper reports and her brief visits to the district.

"The others may represent the affluent, very well-educated portions of El Paso," Dodge said. "The West Side is not representative of El Paso. It's an anomaly."

Commissioner Williams appointed four people to the board of managers: Ed Archuleta, retiring president and CEO of the El Paso Water Utilities' Public Service Board; Carmen Arrieta-Candelaria, chief financial officers for the city of El Paso; state Rep. Dee Margo; and Castleberry. The fifth member will be appointed later.

Archuleta said he lives on the West Side but would represent the entire district's population.

"To me, it doesn't matter where I live, I'm going to be looking after the best interest of the school district," Archuleta said. "I'm not representing any particular group or interest because I live on the West Side. That's the way I manage the utilities. I don't favor any area of the city."

Margo, who was defeated for re-election in November, said the school board's "angst and rancor" is misplaced.

He said the school board has not performed its fiduciary duty to ensure the education of all students, pointing to its failure to have the district's internal auditor report directly to the school board as required by state law and district policy.

Trustees allowed former Superintendent Lorenzo García to oversee the internal auditor's investigation of student transcript manipulations at Bowie High School, which revealed in 2011 that 77 students had grades or grade levels improperly changed.

García pleaded guilty in June to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. One of those charges involved his orchestration of the cheating scheme, which was carried out with the help of six unindicted co-conspirators, and the other involved his steering a $450,000 no-bid contract to his mistress.

"The issue is dealing with an environment that allowed a superintendent to have corrupt, criminal behavior and a hostile atmosphere for teachers," Margo said.

Responding to the board's to challenge of Commissioner Williams' decision, Margo said: "Is this about solving problems or saving face? I would think that the proper response by the board would be not to argue and fight, given the criminal issues that have surfaced."

Commissioner Williams, in taking the extraordinary measure of appointing new leadership for the district, pointed to the lack of public trust in the elected school board in the wake of a cheating scheme in which administrators pushed limited English-speaking students out of school to fraudulently bolster scores on state-mandated tests so struggling schools appeared to meet federal accountability measures.

The TEA on Aug. 13 issued a scathing letter that lowered the district's accreditation status to probation and assigned a monitor to the district because of what the agency called an "utter disregard for the needs of students." The state agency also required the district to hire outside companies to oversee testing and to identify the structural defects in the district that allowed the cheating scheme to thrive and go unchecked.

U.S. Department of Education investigators, who have been auditing EPISD since December 2010, had what is known as an exit conference on Aug. 14 with school district leaders and Texas Education Agency officials. It is not clear what the investigators said during the exit conference, but normally such meetings are a way of discussing preliminary findings before a final audit is released.

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said the state education agency released its sanctions without any knowledge of what federal officials would share during the meeting the next day.

"We knew they had some discussion points they wanted to go over during that Aug. 14 conference call but we didn't know what they were, so consequently that didn't influence our decision," Ratcliffe said.

She said she could not talk about what was discussed during the exit conference call because it is part of an ongoing investigation, but she said she was not aware of any directive for TEA to start taking action against the school district.

A Department of Education spokeswoman declined on Wednesday to say when the department would conclude its 2-year-old investigation.

Ratcliffe said the sanctions TEA imposed on the school district were based primarily on the findings of the EPISD internal audit that revealed grade and grade level manipulations at Bowie High, which helped the campus skirt federal accountability requirements. The audit findings had been kept secret until the El Paso Times obtained a copy in April through the state's Public Information Act.

The Times' reporting revealed that the school district had failed to report the findings to the TEA as recommended in the audit. Then-interim Superintendent Terri Jordan did not send the finalized report to TEA until May of this year.

Ratcliffe said the state agency did not impose sanctions in May because it was waiting on the findings from the U.S. Department of Education. But Ratcliffe said TEA officials decided they could not wait any longer after learning that the federal department would not release findings in August as expected.

She said García's guilty plea in June, information from federal agencies about the ongoing investigation and various news stories published by the El Paso Times that detailed the scheme increased the need for action.

"We had gotten word that there would not be a final report given to the district or us in that so-called exit conference, so we decided that it was time for us to go ahead and act, that we had waited long enough by that point," Ratcliffe said.

Ratcliffe said the exit conference with the U.S. Department of Education did not have any impact on the state agency's decision to appoint a board of managers.

That decision drew the ire of school board member Rocio Benedicto.

She said Williams "took the vote away" from residents of the school district.

"I don't even have words anymore for what has really happened here in El Paso," Benedicto said. "He's attempting to silence our voices as if our votes didn't count, and I cannot stand by and just allow this to happen."

Benedicto was appointed to the board to fill a trustee vacancy in 2011 and has never faced voters.

Only two of the seven trustees -- Alfredo Borrego and Russell Wiggs -- were elected by a majority of their constituents in their most recent election.

The two of them combined received fewer than 1,000 votes.

School board member Joel Barrios was appointed in 2008 and ran unopposed in 2009, so his name has never been on a ballot.

Castañon-Williams was re-elected in 2011 in an unopposed race, which wasn't listed on the ballot.

Two board members, Patricia Hughes and Dodge, were elected despite a majority of their constituents choosing another candidate in the 2011 election.

Dodge garnered 46 percent of the vote, while Hughes re-won her seat with 36 percent of the vote.

"That means that 60 percent of the voters did not want (Hughes), and how is that the will of the voters?" asked Frances Wever, former president of the El Paso Federation of Teachers and Support Personnel.

Since 2004, the school board has had plurality elections, which don't require runoffs if a candidate does not receive a majority of votes. The board earlier this year voted to change to majority elections starting in 2013.

The decision by the board to challenge Commissioner Williams was questioned by a member of the political action committee Kids First! Reform EPISD!.

Shawn Abel, a mother of students in the district and a member of the political action committee, said it was a waste of taxpayer money to have the district's attorney handle the trustees' appeal of the conservator and board of managers.

"The commissioner didn't just pull this out of the air. He heard from people who asked him to step in," Abel said. "As a taxpayer, I have no way to get (trustees) out of office, unlike the City Council. It's very easy to say you're following the will of the voters, but have you listened to voters? There's been a pretty big outcry that we want them to move on."

Some community members spoke against having a board of managers at Tuesday's school board meeting.

Antonio Williams, Castañon-Williams' son, urged the trustees to fight the commissioner's appointments, calling them "a simplistic, undemocratic, offensive solution that was executed by the lowest common denominator of legal responsibility."

"When a commissioner's board of managers is appointed, what will happen is we will have a board of managers who may mean well but will not be accountable to the people because they were not elected by the people," Antonio Williams said. "They do not have an obligation to answer to the people."

Hayley Kappes may be reached at hkappes@elpasotimes.com; 546-6168. Follow her on Twitter @hayleykappes

Zahira Torres may be reached at ztorres@elpasotimes.com; 512-479-6606.

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